


Resurrected

by wishwellingtons



Category: Thick of It (UK)
Genre: 3x07, 3x08, M/M, Series 3, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-06
Updated: 2012-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 17:11:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Messing with the events of 3x07 and 3x08, this fic is either a complex exploration of the dark(er) underbelly of Jamie and Malcolm's relationship, or an excuse for them to have a violent fight in a stairwell. Speculating on Malcolm's marriage, timelines, and the limits of scatalogical terror, this fic sees Malcolm's career cold on the slab, and Jamie determined to create a bit of forcible resurrection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Resurrected

"I should never have given you a fucking key."  
  
"You never _gave_ me a fucking key".  Jamie grinned.  
  
Malcolm walked and waited. Feet on the carpet, hand on the banister, everything designer down to the tiny chrome screws securing handrail to wall. Not enough, not when his Blackberry wouldn't ring and the double garage didn't have a journalist tossing off on it, but he was still better than Steve Fleming, and it helped Malcolm have a pile of flashy shit to prove it.  
  
Malcolm had gone months without noticing most of the aforementioned shit (he'd been a great buyer on the way up but since then had _hardly_ had time for shopping), before circumstance had forced him down and demanded he rescale his life, opening gradations of value in the area previously marked 'meaningless'.  
  
A normal man would have reflected on just how much he _needed to sleep_.  
  
He could hear Jamie behind him, just hear his breath. Jamie’d always been a bit of a fucking mouthbreather, reassuring in a disgusting sort of way, giving Malcolm the chance to tell where he was, even while enjoying the rare privilege of turning your back on Jamie Patrick Feardorcha (not a joke, not even a Catholic one) Macdonald.

Jamie was not only breathing hard, but _thinking_ hard after two-thirds of a bottle of whiskey. Accordingly, the process was audible.  
  
They reached the first floor of Malcolm's house before Jamie got his inspiration. He swayed heavily on the landing, and Malcolm deigned to give him a look.  
  
“So,” he said wearily, “where did you get this key?”  
  
 Jamie’s eyes lit up like a murderer in a photofit. "I stole it while you were being gangbanged by the Ministry of Health. You were licking Edwina Currie's balls so I didn't think you'd mind if I pressed it into a bar of soap and got the local housebreaker to make me a copy. I’m not surprised you don’t remember, it’s probably the Rohypnol.” Jamie smirked. “All the footage is in Piers Morgan's USB and every Hallowe'en he dresses up as Maggie and wanks into the Woolsack."  
  
"Is he a Tory now, then?" Malcolm looked out the window, hand reluctant to touch the bedroom door. Not even a flicker of rage.  
  
Jamie roared (the hand offended him as much as anything else).

  
"Fuck you, Malcolm, be a fucking man. Did you grow a cunt while I wasn't looking? Christ, that wee Robin's got more hair on her bollocks than you. Or did Steve Fleming get those in the fucking divorce?"  
  
Malcolm glared. “Enough of the smash-and-burn shit you’ve done it before.”  
  
He had. When Jamie had finally got past the Hempel security on day 15 of Malcolm's political half-life,1 his tactic had been to stand in the middle of Malcolm’s cream-shag orchid-filled death-smelling Dignitas of a room, pronounce it a ‘fucking hospice’ and then chant ‘you’re shit, you’re shit’ in a Jimmy Boyle monotone until Malcolm got angry enough to answer the interspersed questions about whether he’d been crying. That row (cathartic, vicious, smashed ashtrays) had ended in the usual way, with the hot sticky additions of cheap chow mein and a minibar (the Hempel was too posh for minibars, but Jamie the ex-priest carried miniatures as a putative arsenal).

 

After Malcolm had slept for five hours and cursed Jamie for three more, he’d gone into DoSAC, and made Nicola a lemon zinger in a display of humility Jamie utterly refused to witness. Then they’d got a car back to Malcolm’s (Jamie'd been chatting to his old mate the homeless crack-eyed dosser who slept on Richmond Terrace; Malcolm did sometimes wish he'd picked less _memorable_ friends) and Jamie, seething with lunatic joy, had opened the front door.  
  
Malcolm had frequently, wearily considered the small violence that would be necessary to discover the source of Jamie's key(s) and eradicate them from the earth, but he was lazy on the issue of his pet psycho’s ambulations. He did change his locks, regularly, but not to keep Jamie out and it didn’t work anyway. As soon as Malcolm got a new key, Jamie got one too. Or perhaps he just walked through walls, down chimneys, scummed up through the sewers. The first was more unlikely; if Jamie hadn’t been flesh and blood he wouldn't be so frightening and Malcolm would never have ended up shagging him.  
  
  


***

  
  
Perhaps originally he had given Jamie a key. It would have been to that disgusting bedsit on the Ambleside Road, or even that shithole he shared with the deaf chick and her boyfriend, the anarchists who never washed. He’d been duped by the promise of contacts (this was the start of Malcolm’s career and he’d have eaten raw human flesh with _hoi sin_ sewage if it’d brought him an up). None had ever materialized: when the boyfriend made the _Indy_ , Malcolm still cared enough to fuck the rectum out of other man's career, until the sad, green-haired cunt moved to the _Observer_ and thus took over the job himself.

  
Among these memories from prehistory, Malcolm remembered Jamie vomiting fried Chinese chuck on his bed, the nearest thing they’d had to a christening of the flat and of their friendship. Even with sick on his face, Jamie’d stayed loquacious and they'd managed a staggering row (Jamie’s sectarian songs in front of Malcolm’s girlfriend) before Malcolm threw the reeking duvet out the window and forced Jamie to scrape his puke off the floor. He remembered forcing Jamie to scrape it up with a fork, forcing Jamie to wash his face, calling him a fucking kiddie-fiddling left-footer gobshite softcock, and then standing incredulous for a full five seconds before the blood poured from his nose and he dropped. Out cold. Malcolm woke up to Jamie swearing (nearly weeping); Jamie poured another half-bottle down his throat and insisted he’d never swung for him. Malcolm had reached for Jamie’s testes, closed one eye for accuracy, and crushed.   
  
Malcolm remembered waking up at four with a mouthful of Jamie's sweaty chest and Jamie's terrible breath in his ear. He'd shoved the younger man as hard as he could across the bed (the beginning of Malcolm's physical fastidiousness, essential source of frustration whenever intimacy meant they needed something to fight about). Jamie hadn't woken up, and Malcolm, shuddering slightly, passed back out.  
  
Then he’d woken at six, naked, curled on his side towards a window full of sky. The window was still open; the smells of sick and fried dog had receded. Malcolm moved, cautiously, trying to assess if he was still alone: no.   
  
Jamie was breathing against the small of his back. His breath was foul as the fog rising up from the city, only warm. He had an arm around Malcolm's waist, as heavy as if the fucker had died in the night. Malcolm wasn't prepared to turn and face him, but he would bet he looked bloody ridiculous. The next time it happened, he did turn round, and it turned out he was right.  
  


***

  
  
Now, the new Malcolm, the older Malcolm (the Malcolm who'd reached the summit and exchanged it for the shitheap while Jamie traded the pulpit for the blunt end of Dan Miller's cock) was standing arguing on a heavy carpet in an expensive house first favoured by his wife. The colours of the furnishings were those she'd originally chosen. It suited Malcolm to uphold those nice notions of decor just as it suited him to keep wearing the wedding ring and keep scarifying the world with shock-and-awe. Jamie favoured scatological terror; Malcolm a scorched earth policy rigorously maintained through psychological warfare. Both got the job done.   
  
Leashed fury and the solid satisfaction of someone who shouted; that was what Malcolm got from Jamie. He was the next best thing to Malcolm himself. There had been a magical time prior to Tom’s ascension when shouting Jamie’s name down a phone line or whispering it to a canteen meant Malcolm’s wishes were instantly fulfilled. But that had ended, and everybody fucking knew about it. He’d barely seen the fucker’s face from one month to the next, not until the FCO collapsed (by which time Malcolm was busy playing Malvolio and had bigger things to worry about than Jamie’s sorry balls).  
  
Difficult to admit you got a colossal kick out of a fat-faced psychopath promising to fuck you through the middle of next week, simply because nobody else would dare to. Difficult to admit you got a fucking enormous kick out of silkily threatening Ollie with the same.  
  
Jamie and Malcolm's four epic rows (priesthood, wedding, Sam, FCO; the rows where they hadn’t called each other up for continuation, three hours later) invariably began with jealousy. Malcolm, even in his personal life, made Iago look guileless. Jamie just had the necessary belief that the world was out to glass him and would start by blowing Malcolm. Negotiations (such as they were) were mired in violence (“Don’t fucking bite me, you cunt” “I’ll bury you in the fucking garden and grow dahlias out of your arse. I’ll let my cat shit in your skull.” “You don’t have a cat.” “I’ll buy one and call it Geoff Holnhurst,”), and ended in and disgusting mornings when Malcolm woke first and realised he had no idea what Jamie looked like. Jamie was so unfamiliar, except in perpetual motionm that the sudden composition of regular features and dark lashes, close and peaceful on the adjoining pillow, felt like the arrival of a stranger. Malcolm found himself staring at the ceiling, a lot more unsettled than he’d like.  
  
When Jamie stayed over (like he was going to now, planning to, anyway) Malcolm always slept last and woke first.2 Jamie could sleep standing, sitting, in mid-sentence and during rush hour. An upholstered surface acted like chloroform. Malcolm had an insomniac's insanity and found it unfair.  
  
Nor had Jamie aged. If you liked dead gravediggers and Victorian mobsters, there had been a certain septic ascetic charm to Malcolm at thirty or forty or even forty-five, provided he wasn’t looking at you with pincer-eyed hate. But now, fifty-one, Malcolm looked like the fifteen shades of sick and eau-de-nil to which his complexion tended, even back in the day when Jamie'd looked like a mad cherub and Malcolm's coke habit had reduced every hole in his face to a pink, septic rim.   
  
Normally none of this bothered Malcolm; Jamie didn't bother Malcolm because although he was a flesh-eating virus with the instincts of a Motherwell Mugabe, he was eminently _predictable_ in his wants and needs and Malcolm (senior, superior, cunning as opposed to _totally insane_ ) knew Jamie'd go on being blazing-eyed and an easy slut for as long as Malcolm let him (i.e. until one of them got brain damage).   
  
But, historically, they’d been _together_ during and after intrigues. They’d fucked as tactitians, as men of political supremacy.

 

The fact nagged at Malcolm now. This was the first time they'd fucked (which was a fucking stupid way to start looking at it, Jamie'd make him wear a dress and fucking _slingbacks_ , if he knew) with Malcolm as a buzzword for the jizz under Julius Nicholson's fingernails, as the wad of greasy cotton swabbing Steve Fleming's arse, as a slow encrustation of political smegma. As it affected only him, Malcolm could accept the fact that he was old and depressed and wearing a fleece. The fleece was part of a plan to deadeye DoSAC to its terrified knees, but Malcolm missed work like oxygen and he couldn't fuck Jamie if he wasn't wearing a suit to start with.  
  
And normally, Malcolm never thought about Jamie this much and so they didn't spend time looking at each other.   
  
Jamie was looking at him now.  
  
Jamie'd wanted to be a priest. Malcolm remembered how serious he'd been about it. Same man who hypothesised Pat Phoenix, wanking and desk tidies, same man who (two hours ago) had threatened Malcolm with Al Jolson's discography up his urethra. _In nomine patris, filii et spiritus sancti_ , no doubt _._ So how the hell had Jamie kept those eyes? Why had nothing ever changed for _him_?  
  
Malcolm cracked first. "I'm away for a walk," he snapped, and turned back to the stairs.  
  
"Like fuck you are," said Jamie, and bolted after him.   
  
  
***  
  
  
There was a nasty scuffle at the first of the staircase’s eight points-turn which Malcolm’s wife had so carefully designed with the architect of the Tuckers’ designer home. The spiralling result was a monstrous feat of architectural anatomy on which Malcolm still occasionally barked his shin. The staircase curved and turned and suddenly dropped away (the comparisons were so fucking obvious Malcolm felt a pathetic gobshite for drawing them); Jamie, unused to the pace of pursuit, chucked himself forward and nearly pitched arse over apex, past Malcolm and towards his doom. Malcolm grabbed him by the tie, enjoying a brief _Lion King_ remake with a bug-eyed Scotsman choking on the end of some worsted silk. As he winched Jamie in, though, his knees gave way.   
  
Malcolm dropped down on the step and Jamie sat below him and everything in Malcolm's life suddenly seemed immeasurably worse. Half-throttled but still not inclined to shut up, Jamie cursed and rubbed his neck, pain turning to incredulity as Malcolm, exhausted, rubbed a colourless hand across his face.  
  
He’d seen Malcolm look manic and angry and murderous. He’d never seen him look defeated or tired.   
  
Erratum: he’d seen him look tired but he’d never been forced to acknowledge it.

 

Jamie valued Malcolm as his only equal in a sandstorming, gutless universe. Malcolm broken, Malcolm bowed: these he would not tolerate. Another man might have held out a hand. Instead, Jamie kicked Malcolm's shin.  
  
“What the fuck happened to ‘no surrender’? I’m embarrassed to be in the same room as you.” When Malcolm didn’t answer or move his hand, Jamie knocked it away with a slap.  
  
“Fuck off. Jesus.”  Jamie peered up into Malcolm’s face, now revealed, and plainly didn’t like what he saw. “I said fuck off, Jamie, I’m fucking…. just leave your key and go.”  
  
This time, he kicked the wall. A picture fell off, glass smashing, and Jamie was disgusted when Malcolm didn’t even tell him he’d pay for it.  
  
“Chronic fucking self-pity. Oh Christ. The government’s being fisted by a shiny dildo and a man made of shit – empty the Westminster sewers and it’d look like the Fleming family Christmas – and you’ve gone _mental_. We’ve already got a mental, we've got a duvet full of _shit_ from Tom fucking mental Tiddler’s Arse to keep up the Prozac and prozzers side, what’s it gonnae be for you?”   
  
Malcolm's eyes were like cinders. Or some sort of CGI effect from whizzing late-night sci fi. Jamie wondered if Satan or the face of Death might be going to break out of the darkness or start a remake of _The Thing_ if he kept going, and the thought was cheering. Ocular deathstars were the first sign of _real_ Malcolm in days.   
  
“Self-harm, is that it? Jesus, you look dead Michael Jackson. Do I have to start hiding the fucking Gillette? Should I call those sad fucks at DoSAC and get them to enroll you on group therapy? Perhaps you’d like to dab your eyes with a Kleenex and tell Glenn where the bad man touched you. Or maybe Sam --”

 

“I broke your fucking kneecap once, Macdonald,” Malcolm snarled, and when Jamie added “Or maybe I should just get her to suck my cock,” the frustration and fury of two weeks snapped. Malcolm surged forwards and fell down the stairs with Jamie in his throttling hands.  
  
Disaster followed quickly.  
  
  
***  
  
  
To date, the incident with the chow mein/duvet had been the only time they’d got _really_ violent. This was all about to change.  
  
  
***  
  
  
Jamie hit his head on a cornice. Malcolm got mixed up with a lot of blood (Jamie’s) and spittle (his own), then tried to snap the younger man’s neck, for good measure. This didn’t work, because Jamie (still mostly conscious, foaming like rabid) reached around and fisted a hand in the remains of Malcolm’s steel-grey hair. Jamie enjoyed the feel of it, and yanked, savagely, three times. Malcolm’s head and neck bent back, his grip on Jamie shearing off with a satisfactory groan of pain.   
When the withered neck was stretched into taut, pale flesh,3 Jamie stretched up and bit it, hard. Dazzled with agony, Malcolm recovered his advantage through luck without judgment, and a blind blow caught Jamie on the side of his thick-skulled head. He let go at once, grunting surprise, before he slid completely out of Malcolm’s vision. Conscious that his throat was bleeding, and that his eyes were growing dim, Malcolm decided to stay where he was, sliding down the last two steps and trying to catch his breath.   
  
He was lying at the bottom of the staircase, Jamie now a little way above and (apparently) dead. This was not a comfort.   
  
Malcolm rolled onto his back, felt for concussion, and passed out.  
  
***  
  
When he next woke up, he screamed. Jamie was kneeling over him, twin candles of blood and snot disfiguring his zombie-coloured face, and holding Malcolm’s Blackberry over his head like an ice pick. Malcolm wanted to mutter ‘in the hallway with the lead piping’ but he was too busy preparing to lose life. It took him a while to register that his screams had stopped and the Blackberry was ringing, instead. Jamie had changed the ringtone to Jolson.  
  
“Reach for it, you fuck.”  
  
Malcolm gritted his teeth. This was it. Jamie had gone mad. Despite appearances, until this moment there had been depths of madness which Jamie's natural depravity could not reach. Now, brain damage had evidently bridged the gap.  
  
Malcolm wondered if there were any paparazzi on his step who might help him if his screams could stretch far enough. No. He was an outcast now. He was going to be bludgeoned by a walkie-talkie-wielding Scotsman, all because he was no longer fucking famous. Malcolm strained with every bone and fibre of his bony fibrous frame to get away, but Jamie was straddling him4 and every movement met with dead weight.   
  
“Reach.”  
  
Malcolm thought he was dying. The pressure in his chest was getting worse. In falling down the stairs, he’d probably suffered internal haemorrhage. Great gallons of runaway blood were pouring out of his organs. His chest cavity was one big cardiac spittoon. He managed to choke out some words.  
  
“I’ll wear your skull as a sunhat. I’ll make your skin into a lampshade and fuck Cal Richards by its light.”  
  
Jamie looked like the hunchback who climbs the tower at the exact moment lightning strikes and he starts to swing on the bell. It was a mild, summery afternoon but Malcolm saw him as a Hammer House negative. He held the Blackberry aloft like a tiny hostage.  
  
“Answer your phone,” he seethed. “Or I will.”  
  
And that was the moment Malcolm understood what Jamie was doing, and that was the moment he went absolutely wild. His eyes blazed. His lips snarled back and he was teeth and spit and bile and shoving upwards to try and punch Jamie in the face. Jamie could smell his desperation and fury, heart singing all the while. Malcolm was shouting so loud and hoarse he might genuinely make himself sick.  
  
“Do not,” he roared, “use my fucking _phone_ to manipulate me. I was shitting in Downing Street before you stopped burying your food. I was _in charge_ of all this before you stopped fucking hunting in a pack and sleeping in trees. You’re fucking Caliban to me, son." Jamie grinned like a missionary enjoying an excellent afternoon of skull-drilling and waved Malcolm's mobile through another round of tinny protest. "I had a Blackberry when Steve Fleming couldn’t send a fucking email. So give me my fucking phone or I will take it – don’t answer it, the clue to callers would be when you could only talk _shit_ – and I’ll take _your_ phone, and I’ll knit them together with your fucking colon, which I’ll be extracting via your fucking eyes with that fucking vase you just broke, and then I’ll slam the whole thing down your fucking throat in a big telecommunications sandwich and _fax_ every five fucking minutes until you get cancer. From the aerial I’ll install in your arse. It’ll be prostate Chernobyl. Give me that phone.”   
  
Jamie complied. Malcolm brought it to his ear, seething about if Jamie’d broken his nose again.   
  
“I didn’t,” said Jamie, cheerily, wiping blood on his cuffs. “I never mark their faces.”   
  
Malcolm pointed savagely at his throat, and Jamie started to whistle. It was a deliberately infuriating Old Firm tune, once amended with lyrics re: Malcolm Tucker's lack of bollocks/tranvestism propensities, but unusually Malcolm didn’t argue. What he’d heard on the other end of the phone so stunned him that he didn’t even notice the music or (minutes later) Jamie starting to unbutton his jeans.   
  
He let Jamie nudge his thighs apart without registering, tilting his hips automatically but wearing the glassy, stunned look that Jamie preferred to associate with a (much) later stage of the process. Settling on his stomach (it would take a fucking blowjob to get Malcolm back to politics, Jamie decided, but he loved his country enough to give it), Jamie was eventually displeased to feel an arresting hand on the scruff of his neck. In another second, it dragged him up by his hair, but one look at Malcolm’s face stilled the younger man completely. Malcolm was staring past him with nonspecific incredulity on his features, and an answering shiver of excitement went down Jamie’s back. There would soon be fresh bodies to bury. After a few more words, Malcolm hung up and saw Jamie’s blinding, deafening smile.  
  
“The game’s afoot,” he said, softly. “Someone set a pap on Arnage and Fleming. They’ve been long-lensed in the park.”  
  
Jamie grinned up at him, settling back between Malcolm’s legs. “Julius’ll have to fucking bury him.”  
  
“Yeah.” Malcolm still looked dazed, in a manner unconnected either with sex or falling down the stairs. His lips were chapped and he wet them; a gesture that, on Malcolm, always looked both furtive and reptilian. When he spoke again, his throat was very dry.  
  
“I need to go in. They want me in.”   
  
And then he laughed, and it was like the sun coming out (or going back in, depending on whether or not you liked Malcolm Tucker). Great affection in his voice, Malcolm grinned. “Jamie, you devious fuck.”   
  
  


***

  
  
Jamie only stopped feeling like God on the seventh day when Malcolm, upright, stumbled and cluchted his arm hard enough to trap nerves. “Jesus Christ, did you give me concussion?”  
  
“Man up. Did you not notice me blowing you?”  
  
There was a pause, in which Malcolm slid a look over him, as cunning and careful as Jamie had ever seen. “You’d barely started.”  
  
“Fuck you,” Jamie said, up for round two, and Malcolm surprised them both by kissing him. It was metallic and brief and tasted badly of Jamie’s cigarettes. But Jamie’d been addicted to Malcolm’s mouth for as long as he could remember, and he was panting (Malcolm smirking) when they pulled apart.   
  
Malcolm didn’t release him at once. “Julius’ll be unsteadier than Fred West’s crazy paving.”  
  
“Stop it, you’re turning me on, eh. I just saved your political career. You should thank me in the traditional manner.”  
  
“Yeah, and you can wash the blood off my walls while I’m gone.”   
  
“I’m not your fucking hausfrau,” replied Jamie, and followed with several more baroque obscenities, until Malcolm was forced to shut him up and find his coat. They caught sight of their faces in the mirror. Malcolm touched the back of his head, and winced.   
  
“Not dying, not 'kin trying.”  
  
“Burke and fucking Hare,” Malcom retorted, under his breath. But he didn’t sound unhappy “When the new order is built, you will not go unrewarded. Don’t smoke in my house, you know you’re not allowed.” he added, pretending to ignore the fact that, instead of staying where he was, Jamie was putting on his coat as well.   
  
“I’m not your fucking dog.”  
  
“Oh yes you are, and come Boxing Day I’m gonnae leave you on the motorway. Rolf Harris’ll launch a transatlantic fucking appeal. There’ll be endless closeups of your pathetic, slavering face but in the end Simon Cowell’ll run a phone-in over who gets to shoot you.”  
  
“Rolf Harris? How _gay_ are you?”   
  
For some reason they left the house _together_ and got into the waiting car. During the drive, Jamie popped him a pill which promised to postpone the concussion for long enough to sack Steve Fleming and launch a General Election.   
  
Jamie had his own plans: call the poofs at DoSAC, light a few fires, break a few windows. Get the fucking woad on and send Peter Mannion Cal Richards’ head on a spike. Spin, pillage and loot. Start providing a proper, blood-soaked lining to the battlefield. At peace, he sat quietly beside Malcolm, hands on his knees, gazing out of the windows. The medley he was whistling was naggingly tuneless, the kind of off-key that might be standard issue in the exec wing of Guantanamo, but Malcolm guessed it was Jolson and felt glad of it, letting the noise thread in and out of the fifteen calls he made before Westminster.   
  
During number thirteen, Jamie leant across and covered the receiver.  
  
“Just so you know,” he said, confidentially, “when this is finished, I’m going to fuck you so hard you can’t walk.”   
  
Malcolm considered this this for a moment. His eyelids dropped lower than was usual, and Jamie watched his mouth slacken, just for a second. Jamie considered, not for the first time, that he was the only man in Greater London who made Malcolm Tucker come.5  
  
When he took the caller back off hold, Malcolm’s voice had dropped three octaves.   
  
As the car pulled into Downing Street, Jamie sat back and grinned at all the people whose lives they were about to irrevocably fuck. And then, when everyone was crying, he’d go and smoke in Malcolm’s living room, splash whiskey on his stupid furniture and – two or three a.m., Malcolm’s eyes smoky and both of them too pissed to speak – gather his second strength and fuck Malcolm over that beige tumour of a couch.

 

The car pulled to a halt. Flunkies, wedged behind the Downing Street door like neurotic sardines, rushed out to meet them, balking (and in one case visibly recoiling) when they saw there were two men in the car.   
  
For Jamie, fear was his favourite flavour and he wanted this by the lump. They were back. The world was taking it in.   
  
The horror at the fleece. The palpable uncertainty. The headless, disoriented sense of terror and confusion which Malcolm’s presence still inspired. And then there _he_ was, at Malcolm’s shoulder, ready not just to bury the bodies but bludgeon them with the spade. He would hack limbs off and fit them into prefabricated graves.   
  
Jamie grinned out at the flunkies, promising their deaths. Malcolm shut his phone. This was a better day.

 

  
**THE END**

  
  


* * *

  
  
1 Malcolm had moved to the Hempel on day 14. Jamie was barred from it (and every other small hotel in London), and Malcolm knew that it would be on day 15 that Jamie tried to find him. Having vandalized Malcolm’s home bathroom, it would take him a further six hours to menace the hotel trade and gain entrance to Malcolm’s suite.  
  
2 At least since Jamie had stopped spiking his drinks.   
  
3 Jamie had been trying, for years, to tie Malcolm up during sex. Malcolm had vowed to fellate Cal Richards before this happened. Jamie took that as (quote) “an admission of fucking guilt, you shit, whenever he’s around you’re like Vanessa Feltz in a kosher pie shop” and put his fist through the bathroom wall.   
  
4 This was always Jamie’s preferred stance, in relation to Malcolm, and Malcolm found it both fitting and ironic that he should assume it as a prelude to taking Malcolm’s life.  
  
5  Except Malcolm himself. Which Jamie had seen. After that evening, Jamie had suffered for some time from the feeling that there was nothing left to achieve.  



End file.
